[geebee]

It depends.

There's a kind of professor I like to refer to as the "wheel of misfortune" professor. I think we've all known them - they're one of a group of professors who teach a standard part of a curriculum but teach a vastly different version of the class, with outlier levels of time commitment and grading standards. This professor can end up severely disadvantaging certain cohorts simply because the students had the misfortune to end up in the unfortunate class based on a spin of the wheel, because of what year they entered a program or what time slot of day happened to be open in their course schedule. Well connected students who ask around are often aware of who you need to dodge.

I've known a few of these professors, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that a student who happens to have the misfortune of this particular professor for organic chemistry or intro to data structures and algorithms is measurably less likely to continue in the major or professional path than a student who happens to enroll in the same credit class with someone else. I remember a nature show about newly born fawns and grizzly bears. A fawn's survival to adulthood is largely a matter of chance, depending on which side of the river the hungry grizzly bear happens to be wandering down that day. These professors are the grizzly bears of the academic world, and they leave a real trail of destruction in their wake.

To be clear - I don't know that this particular professor qualifies as a grizzly bear. A few red flags - such as cheating and not attending class - suggest to me that the scenario I described above might not quite apply. But I do know that these professors often invoke rigor and standards as a justification for the harm they do - as if the other professors, who assign higher grades and higher completion rates don't teach a rigorous class.

When this happens, I generally see no need to "fire" someone - I'd just limit the professor's teaching load to advanced, intensely difficult electives at the upper division or grad level.

[mcguire]

"WSN also accessed student evaluation records for courses taught by Jones, which showed that his scores had been consistently low for years — long before the spring 2022 student petition. In the past five years, Jones’ co-professors teaching the same course typically had scores around or above 4.0 on a 5.0 scale, while Jones averaged around 3.3. In his final semester, his evaluation score dropped to 2.4. The stark contrast between those numbers shows that students weren’t just complaining about the intensity of the course." (https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytime...)

The spring 2022 class was "experimental" (presumably due to the end of COVID restrictions) as well.